Introducing Professional Services. Learn how we can help accelerate your payments transformation.Learn more →
A subsidiary ledger is used to keep track of the details for a specific control account within a company’s general ledger.
What is a Subsidiary Ledger?
Subsidiary ledgers track transactions within their control accounts in greater detail. Control accounts, sometimes called adjustment or controlling accounts, are summary accounts within the general ledger. For every control account, there is also a corresponding subsidiary ledger.
Transactions may appear in both the subsidiary ledger and the corresponding control account, but those transactions only appear as an ending balance in the control account.
The details of the transactions—where they came from, the dates they were paid, and what they’re for—are all tracked in the subsidiary ledger. The information within any subsidiary ledgers and the general ledger is then used to assemble the financial statements for a business.
Subsidiary ledgers can be created for any general ledger account, but they are generally most useful for instances of high transaction volume such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory, or fixed assets.
Try Modern Treasury
See how smooth payment operations can be.
Learn
Ledgers are foundational to any company that moves money at scale. Explore the accounting fundamentals behind the ledgering process, the differences between application ledgers and general ledgers, and more.
A chart of accounts (COA) is an index of all the different accounts within a company’s ledger.
A digital wallet (also sometimes called an electronic wallet) is an application that securely stores digital payment information and password data for a user.
A Ledger Database is a database that stores accounting data. More specifically, a ledger database can store the current and historical value of a company’s financial data.
Learn the difference between Single-Entry Accounting and Double-Entry Accounting
Data immutability is the idea that information within a database cannot be deleted or changed. In immutable—or append-only—databases, data can only ever be added.
In the context of software, concurrency control is the ability for different parts of a program or algorithm to complete simultaneously without conflict. Concurrency controls in a database ensure that simultaneous transactions will be parsed appropriately.
An API call is idempotent if it has the same result, regardless of how many times it is applied. Inadvertent duplicate API calls can cause unintended consequences for a business, idempotency helps provide protection against that.
A ledger API allows companies who need to move money at scale quickly and easily access, track, audit, and unify all of their financial data in one place.
The ledger balance, also called the current balance, is the opening amount of money in any checking account every morning. The ledger balance should remain the same for the duration of the day.
A ledger (also called a general ledger, accounting ledger, or financial ledger) is a record-keeping system for a company’s financial transaction data.
A subsidiary ledger is used to keep track of the details for a specific control account within a company’s general ledger.
Subscribe to Journal updates
Discover product features and get primers on the payments industry.